Culture

It Took A Marketing Company Six Months To Come Up With The Least Surprising Slogan For Fremantle

"It’s a strong stake in the ground to say we are Fremantle," the mayor said of the slogan.

by Joseph Earp  6 April 2019
A still of beachgoers from the This Is Fremantle ad campaign

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Fremantle is, as far as Western Australian cities go, a pretty nice place.

It’s got views across the water, a historic and fascinating old jail, a bustling night life, a subversive, anti-authoritarian streak, and it’s sister cities with the quaint and beautiful Yokosuka in Japan.

For those reasons, you’d think it would be reasonably easy to come up with a pithy slogan to attract people to Fremantle — a kind of uplifting motto, best designed to show off what makes it such a lovely place to visit.

Moreover, you might think that’d make it especially easy to come up with a pithy slogan if your whole business was getting paid to come up with pithy slogans. It’s not like having to advertise barrels of toxic waste, or one of the crummier, less flashy deadly sins — something like ‘Envy’ or ‘Wrath’. Fremantle is a place that many thousands of people choose to live. All you need to do is generate one sentence that encourages a few more people to.

Well, after six months of work and $300,000 one marketing company has spectacularly failed to do just that. The new slogan for the city of Fremantle, unveiled last night, is: “This Is Fremantle.”

Now here’s the thing: I can certainly imagine the marketing meeting where someone — maybe a junior staffer — suggested that slogan. Maybe it was early in the morning. Maybe everyone had not slept very well the night before. And listen, everyone needs to drop a bad idea or two before they get to the good ones. This is a form of creative purging, and you learn what you want your end goal to be by deciding what you don’t want it to be.

So sure, I get it. What I can’t imagine, however, is all the steps that came afterwards. I can’t imagine many, many people — from marketing execs to Fremantle officials to sign writers — all hearing the new slogan uttered aloud, and then doing anything but releasing a primal scream of rage.

But maybe most of all, I can’t imagine that junior staffer could unwind at the end of the day, slogan submitted, leaning back in their chair like a Western Australian Don Draper, nodding gently to themselves, thinking “job well done.”

I am sorry Fremantle. You did not deserve this. You particularly didn’t deserve the response your mayor delivered when pressed on the slogan.

“It’s a strong stake in the ground to say we are Fremantle,” Mayor Brad Pettitt told assembled reporters, presumably assuming their cameras were off.

Lead image: Still from ‘This Is Fremantle” promotional video.